October 10, 1971

Sylvia Plath playing Pygmalion to her own Galatea

By HELEN VENDLER

CROSSING THE WATER TRANSITIONAL POEMS
By Sylvia Plath.

hough this book, as Elizabeth Hardwick remarked recently, is by no means Sylvia Plath's best, it forms a chapter of her poetic life. In these
poems, written between 1960 and late 1961 and antedating "Ariel," the poet plays Pygmalion to her own Galatea, willing herself into shape, struggling against the inherited outlines of her predecessors. There are very grotesque
stages along the way, as in some larval metamorphosis: the roaring-ram disguise of Dylan Thomas; babbling exclamatory whispers-in-the-potting- shed after the manner of Theodore Roethke; duets between heaven and earth in Stevensian orchestration;
and many plaintive familial brutalities learned from Lowell. What exhausting costumes these were, and how heavy, and how distasteful to Sylvia Plath's soul we can only judge from her persistent attempts to shed these skins, and finally,
in "Ariel" and some later poems, to transcend them. Meanwhile, here she rages about in these disguises like some rebellious adolescent dressed by her mother in unsuitable clothes.

There were problems in Sylvia Plath's life deeper than the problem of poetic inheritance, more fundamental exhaustions than these tireless searches for the right wedding garment. Some critics have invoked the word "schizophrenia" in talking
about these poems, but Plath's sense of being several people at once never here goes beyond what everyone must at some time feel.

There are three selves present, for instance, in "Two Sister of Persephone": Persephone, herself, has already chosen the realm of death with Pluto; the second sister has chosen a work of bone-dry intellect, where her squint eyes go rat-shrewd
and her meager frame goes root-pale; the third sister has chosen to be the bridge of the sun, and lies "bronzed as earth. . .lulled near a bed of poppies," where she "bears a king." Though the preference among these
selves might seem made distressingly naïve by the serene picture of the third sister, the poem ends not with the bride but with the intellectual one "turned bitter/And sallow as any lemon. . .wry virgin to the last." The
bride remains a daydream of romance. Persephone herself, except in the title of the poem, is never mentioned at all, and yet it is she who creates the powerful undertow which drowns, finally, the other two selves.

There are poems in this volume written, one might say, by each of the three sisters. Persephone's are the best. Nevertheless, the bride-turned-wry-virgin has some triumphant lines, dismissing her husband, her marriage, and even, finally, herself.

He was bullman earlier,
Kind of the dish, my lucky animal....
He kept blowing me kisses.
I hardly knew him.

Mud-sump, happy sty-face.
I've married a cupboard of rubbish....
Hogwallow's at the window.
The star won't save me this month.
I housekeep in Time's gut-end
Among emmets and mollusks,
Duchess of Nothing,
Hairtusk's bride.

In another poem of split selves, a total neutrality or willed absence of affect creates a self of plaster, agreeable to the outside world which rewards plaster saints, but horrifying to the authentic self:

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.

At first the symbiosis seems possible, but eventually the plaster saint becomes more and more impatient with the slovenly and manageable "real" self and, helpless though the imprisoned soul may be, she begins to plan her revenge:

Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength.

Though a poem like this seems a textbook illustration of R. D. Laing crossed with Women's Lib, it fails to authenticate Laing, consciousness-raising or itself. To find the genuine Plath, it is not enough to say that she is the ugly and hairy id repressed
by the saintlike superego. On the contrary, she is not at all exclusively a libido in search of liberation. Her rage, though it may come from the most primitive levels, is not primitive in its most natural utterance: an undeniable intellect
allegorizes the issues before they are allowed expression. Even in the famous "Daddy," the elaborate scheme of Prussian-and- Jew has been constructed to contain the feelings of victimization and the decade-by- decade deaths in
"Lady Lazarus" are as neat a form of incremental repetition as any metaphysical poet could have wanted.

In some way, Sylvia Plath sensed that her sensual or appetitive impulses were not the single-minded component she would have liked them to be. And yet, in her wish to be physical and uncomplicated, she wrote poems pretending a buoyant sense of physicality,
playing herself false in them, as in this poem about pregnancy:

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Only the last line is grim enough to wake a reader's response. The rest is pure silliness. Still, in sympathy one wants to say that the aridity of the intellect in dealing with life, and its pure insufficiency to metabolic processes, is enough to
send anyone round the bend in this particular fashion, to turn a woman into a talking melon.

Plath would like, in distinct distrust of mind, to trust nature, and yet she ends, in the volume, by refusing nature any honorable estate of its own. "The horizons ring me," she says in the opening words of this volume, and this awful centripetal
sense binds nature into a compass much smaller than it deserves. The poet's eye bounds the limits of the world, and all of nature exists only as a vehicle to her sensibility. The wind stops her breath "like a bandage," the
sky exists as her "ceiling" with an "old star-map" on it; the night sky is "only a sort of carbon paper" poked through with holes; the new moon looks like "the skin seaming a scar." Some such scrim-curtain
of pain veils all images of the natural world in reductive metaphors, till we ask whether there ever was, in Sylvia Plath at this time, a genuine sense of something existing that was not herself. (Later, her children became real other
beings to her, if we can judge from the poems in "Ariel.")

There are moments when the imposition of self on the world attains a beautiful, if deceptive, coherence:

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people. . .
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;
Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

But on the other hand, nature undomesticated becomes purely soulless; in the Canadian wilderness, the rocks "offer no purchase to herbage or people." The withdrawal of affect annihilates not only nature but people, who become, seen on their
holidays, "grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,/Lard-pale." They exist only insofar as they are criticized; they exist only to be criticized. They are not allowed independence, they have no solidity, they are stick-figures
to prove a point about how horrible Whitsun holidays are.

Too often, in this volume, a metaphor is chosen and used without any full sense of its own unalterable solidity apart from the poet's use of it. It is understandable that a writer, surveying her less successful poems, should think "It is as
though they are my stillborn children." But then, as she takes up the metaphor of the mother of the stillborn, she invests the poem with a kind of ghastly friskiness that is not in any way what a real mother of the stillborn would
say about her children, leaving us to wonder why Plath invoked the parallel in the first place:

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. . . .
O I cannot understand what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile and smile at me. . . .

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air--
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.

Pigs and fishes, alive or not, are not what the mother of a dead child wishes her child were. This falseness to the wellsprings of life from which metaphors are drawn, though it can serve certain surrealistic purposes, palls in the long run and endangers
several poems in this book. Thus, a woman who has had a face-lift thinks of her operation as a successful suicide-and-resurrection, and says of her old self:

They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years. . . .
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.

This, we can say with hindsight, is less the poem of a woman having a face-lift than the poem of a woman fantasizing a harmless form of suicide. Metaphor here acts to conceal rather than to clarify.

Sylvia Plath's ruthlessness toward her own work is clear in her relentless advance, in "Ariel" and other posthumously-published poems, toward a purer selfhood. To criticize the poems in "Crossing the Water" is to share in her
own evident self-criticism of them: she went on to do better. But even here there are some poems which justify themselves without apology, and the fact that they are among the most clinical and harsh shows the direction, never fully travelled,
in which her verse was going. Some of these poems are sensational and primitive, like the one in which a surgeon describe his work:

It is a garden I have to do with--tubers and fruits
Oozing their jammy substances,
A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.
Stenches and colors assail me. . . .
I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.

But Plath's verse had another, less lurid, direction as well, appearing in the best poem of this collection, "Parliament Hill Fields." It is, so far as I can deduce, a poem spoken by a mother to her dead child, and she presents her feelings,
both admirable and less admirable, in drained lines which aim at no self-display:

The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow:
You know me, less constant,
Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.
I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy.
These faithful dark-boughed cypresses

Brood, roots in their heaped losses.
Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.
I lose sight of you on your blind journey,
While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets
Unspool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them,

Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem.

It is a moment of admission equal to Emerson's on the death of his son: "This calamity. . .does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me. . . .falls off from me and leaves no scar."
"I supposed it's pointless to think of you at all," say Plath: "Already your doll grip lets go." These helpless lines of lack and silence remain to enrich this volume beyond glitter and flash, pointing to a depth
opening toward "Ariel."